gate-lodge was in ruins, and the weed-grown avenue was
covered with cow-dung.

'Which of the girls do you like best?' said Alice, who wished to cease
thinking of the poverty in which the spinsters lived.

'Emily, I think; she doesn't say much, but she is more sensible than the
other two. Gladys wearies me with her absurd affectations; Zoe is well
enough, but what names!'

'Yes, Emily has certainly the best of the names,' Alice replied,
laughing.

'Are the Miss Brennans at home?' said Cecilia, when the maid opened the
hall-door.

'Yes, miss--I mean your ladyship--will you walk in?'

'You'll see, they'll keep us waiting a good half-hour while they put on
their best frocks,' said Cecilia, as she sat down in a faded arm-chair
in the middle of the room. A piano was rolled close against the wall,
the two rosewood cabinets were symmetrically placed on either side of
the farther window; from brass rods the thick, green curtains hung in
stiff folds, and, since the hanging of some water-colours, done by Zoe
before leaving school, no alterations, except the removal of the linen
covers from the furniture when visitors were expected, had been made in
the arrangement of the room.

The Brennan family consisted of three girls--Gladys, Zoe, and Emily.
Thirty-three, thirty-one, and thirty were their respective ages. Their
father and mother, dead some ten or a dozen years, had left them joint
proprietors of a small property that gossip had magnified to three
thousand. They were known as the heiresses of Kinvarra; snub noses and
blue eyes betrayed their Celtic blood; and every year they went to spend
a month at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, returning home with quite a
little trousseau. Gladys and Zoe always dressed alike, from the bow
round the neck to the bow on the little shoe that they so artlessly with
drew when in the presence of _gentlemen_. Gladys' formula for receiving
visitors never varied:

'Oh, how do you do--it is really too kind of you to give yourself all
this trouble to come and see us.'

Immediately after Zoe put out her hand. Her manner was more jocose:

'How d'ye do? We are, I am sure, delighted to see you. Will you have a
cup of tea? I know you will.'

Emily, being considered too shy and silent, did not often come down to
receive company. On her devolved the entire management of the house and
servants; the two elder sisters killed time in the way they thought
would give least offence to their neighbours.